4.1 How to Start
How Do I Get Started in Developing a Local Housing Strategy?
Developing a local housing strategy is a time- and resource-intensive process. It requires strong and clear leadership, sustained engagement of leadership across municipal agencies, and active participation from both internal and external stakeholders.
Key Questions to Consider
Local Housing Solutions recommends that localities interested in developing a local housing strategy do some upfront planning to help ensure they have engaged the right parties and are clear about what they hope to accomplish. Here are some questions that can be helpful to address:
- Why is this process important to undertake?
- How will it be different from previous housing-related planning efforts?
- Who should lead the effort?
- What key agency partners should be involved, and what structure should the partnership take?
- How will we engage the public and elected officials?
- How long will it take to develop a local housing strategy, and when should it be enacted?
- Who does the heavy lifting (e.g., analysis, public engagement, communications, etc.)?
- Who is missing – who else should be involved?
First Steps
Click on each of the headings below for tips for planning a local housing strategy creation process.
One key question to consider is whether the jurisdiction is ready to develop a housing strategy. Is it a clear priority for the locality? Is the locality prepared to support the strategy financially? Is there a leader prepared to oversee its development? Assuming the answer to all of these questions is yes, the time may be ripe for developing a local housing strategy.
If there’s a need to first raise the visibility of housing to build political will for a more intensive policy response, it can sometimes be helpful to hold an event, like a Housing Summit, that brings together key stakeholders, lays out the evidence for the locality’s housing challenges, and ends with a call for action.
It’s essential to have clear leadership for the process of developing a local housing strategy. The ideal leader would have the convening power to bring together multiple agency partners and stakeholders to support the creation of a local housing strategy. This could be a mayor, a county executive, or someone they appoint – such as a deputy mayor – or a city councilmember. A mandate from the top levels of government will help align interagency staff under a common approach.
Local housing strategies rely on committed engagement across municipal departments and stakeholder involvement. When getting started, it can be helpful to compile a list of municipal or regional departments or agencies whose policies affect the cost, quality, and stability of housing and consider involving all of those in strategy development and implementation; that list could include:
- the housing department
- the planning department
- the department(s) responsible for building inspections and permits
- the department(s) responsible for municipal taxation and tax foreclosures
- the planning or zoning commission
- transportation or infrastructure agencies
- the local housing authority
- the homelessness service agency
- the redevelopment agency
- any local housing finance agency
Before launching the planning effort, it is important for localities to think about how they will involve external stakeholders, like nonprofits, neighborhood groups, faith-based organizations, developers, service providers, lenders, and employers. Some localities develop a task force or advisory committee of external stakeholders to oversee and provide feedback on the strategy work that municipal staff or a consultant completes.
In addition to identifying the key players, localities may want to consider conducting a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to help assess the locality’s readiness for developing a local housing strategy and identify areas of weakness and potential threats that may impede interagency collaboration and progress.
It is also important to consider whether a locality has the resources to develop the strategy in-house or prefers to hire a consultant to assist or some combination of the two. Click on the questions in the boxes below for some factors to consider in making this decision.
The following questions can help localities determine whether to hire consultants to help with their local housing strategy:
- Do local staff have the expertise and capacity to produce housing market, demographic, tax, zoning, policy, and/or spatial analyses to support the creation or refinement of a local housing strategy?
- Do you need to create property and land inventories, evaluate existing conditions or specialized environmental considerations, and if so, will you need outside assistance with these tasks?
- Are staff knowledgeable about all of the available housing policy options?
- Does your community have areas of contention where a third-party assessment or expert might help facilitate collaboration, consensus building, and decision-making?
- Is there a potential that strategies developed by a consultant would receive less support from local partners?
- Are there competing priorities that may reduce the availability of local staff to help with the housing strategy (e.g., potential alignment with the budgeting process, legislative cycles, or other planning processes) that might favor the hiring of a consultant to expedite the process?
- Are there funds available to support a consultant’s budget?
When developing a local housing strategy, localities can conduct all the work in-house or hire one or more consultants to provide technical support or additional capacity. When deciding whether to hire a consultant, localities should consider staff knowledge, areas of expertise, and workload, as well as the specific requirements of the strategy, the process to develop it, and where an outside perspective of the facilitator may be beneficial.